Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction

Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction is the successor to Sir John Lyons’s important study Language, Meaning and Context (1981).While preserving the general structure of the earlier book, the author has substantially expanded its scope to introduce several topics that were not previously discussed, and to take into account developments in linguistic semantics. The resulting work is an invaluable guide to the subject, offering clarifications of its specialised terms and explaining its relationship to formal and philosophical semantics and to contemporary pragmatics. With its clear and accessible style it will appeal to a wide student readership. Sir John Lyons is one of the most important and internationally renowned contributors to the study of linguistics. His many publications include Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (1968) and Semantics (1977).

• Author is one of the most distinguished names in the field • This study builds on his 1981 book to take account of more recent developments in the subject • Clearly and accessibly written with lots of useful definitions

Preface; List of symbols and typographical conventions; Part I. Setting the Scene: 1. Metalinguistic preliminaries; Part II. Lexical Meaning: 2. Words as meaningful units; 3. Defining the meaning of words; 4. The structural approach; Part III. Sentence-Meaning: 5. Meaningful and meaningless sentences; 6. Sentence-meaning and propositional content; 7. The formalisation of sentence-meaning; Part IV. Utterance-Meaning: 8. Speech acts and illocutionary force; 9. Text and discourse; context and co-text; 10. The subjectivity of utterance; Suggestions for further reading; Bibliography; Index.